CMCstudent 1/22/09

In class, tmesis was explained by Dr. Rog as us rewriting what we read or think, in which way we become the author. As I was sitting starting to work on my blog I mentioned to my roommate I was writing about tmesis. She asked what it was and I leaned over my chair and started to explain to her. I was telling her that when you see a text you automatically put in (interject) your own experiences when reading. As I was explaining I saw the words “baby come back” on her poetry homework. I instinctively starting singing that “Baby Come Back” song from the Swifter Wet Jet commercial. I immediately realized that I was using tmesis right there! Those words did not just mean baby come back, instead a song came into my head that I knew was from something so familiar, that commercial! When I sang the “baby come back” line to my roommate she told me she hadn’t been able to even concentrate on her poetry homework because each time she read that line she started singing that song. She even said that when the class was going over the poetry everyone was singing the song too! It shows how we are manipulated through tmesis, because just as we know we can interject our thought, marketers and advertisers know that they can use things to trigger our tmesis on the spot. The whole class singing “baby come back” is a perfect example of how tmesis can be manipulated through advertisements.

Tmesis kind of reminds me of what we learned in CMC 100. That being that there are 3 ways to read a text: Dominant hegemonic, negotiated reading, and oppositional. Dominant hegemonic, when you read the text as the designer wanted you to, whether or not they are using tmesis to get what they want across to you. If a text is read negotiated or oppositional then that means that the tmesis was not able to be determined by the writer and the reader wrote into it their own story as to their experiences which were perhaps not exactly the same as those the writer had in mind.